A Year in Reading: Hannah Pittard

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This spring, in Chicago, Powell’s Book Store closed its Lincoln Avenue location. For local book lovers, it was sad news. But it was also (admittedly selfishly) somewhat happy news in that all prices were slashed by 50 precent. I was in the market to shake up my reading list. I wanted to encounter authors with whom I was entirely unfamiliar — not necessarily new to the world, but new to me. So when I found a small collection of NYRB Classics, I bought the entire shelf. There are too many good books from that pile to mention in this short space — though I can’t resist a swift shout-out to Stephen Benatar’s beautiful portrait of delirium, Wish Her Safe at Home – but the real show-stealer was Elizabeth Taylor’sA Game of Hide and Seek. It is a somersault through time and space. Taylor brings to vivid life more than a dozen characters — though the story truly belongs to Harriet and Vesey, would-be childhood sweethearts — then swiftly breaks the hearts of them all.

Another book I am compelled to mention — not from the NYRB collection — is one that came out just this year, Howard Norman’sNext Life Might Be Kinder, which I picked up on the recommendation of a good friend. This novel is quiet and loud, funny and sad. It’s a story that both fetishizes grief and convicts it. I fell in love with Norman and I fell in love with his narrator, Sam, who was dubbed — in one New York Times review — as “churlish, impatient, uncharitable and rude.” I found this description both annoying (in its dismissal) and apt: One of my favorite sections of John Gardner’sOn Becoming a Novelist is his account of the storyteller’s several qualities. (Sam, like his creator Howard Norman, is a storyteller.) Gardner says storytellers are prone to, among other things, “obstinacy and a tendency towards churlishness (a refusal to believe what all sensible people know is true)…,” which is Next Life’s very premise. It’s not me who’s reading Gardner currently; it’s my husband. But when he showed me the passage, I delighted in the exquisite rightness of the word — churlish. The reviewer hadn’t intended it as a compliment, but on Sam’s behalf, I’ve since taken it as one. Like Taylor, Norman is a temporal acrobat.

Hannah Pittard
is the author of three novels, Reunion, The Fates Will Find Their Way, and the forthcoming Listen to Me (2016). She is winner of the 2006 Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award, a MacDowell Colony Fellow, and a consulting editor for Narrative Magazine. She divides her time between Chicago and Lexington, Kentucky, where she lives with her husband, W. Andrew Ewell. Follow her on Twitter @hannahpittard.

3 comments:

Great to see a shout out for both Elizabeth Taylor and NYRB. I haven’t read this title yet, but I did read Angel and loved it. I’ve read about 40 titles from NYRB, and almost all have been fantastic. Really some of the best books I’ve ever read.

Glad to see someone heralding Norman, who never gets nearly enough attention, though I think the premise of the novel is less how grief can turn a man churlish or obstinate, and more the degree to which he wants the courtship within the marriage to persist.

Recently (this fall—autumn being more tangible to me than the integer “year”) I have read, and been amazed by Golden Gulag, by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, which a friend in the collective Endnotes (whose new issue was just published) recommended to me. This book provides a detailed structural account, and analysis, of how, and why, the prison system in California has grown so massive, and so “modern.” And come to think of it I also read Angela Davis’s dagger of a book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, which does in 128 pages what Michelle Alexander’sThe New Jim Crow does in several hundred, but to be Davis’s reader and have that effect produced you probably need to either have already read Alexander’s excellent and very important book, or to be already a yes in response to Ms. Davis’s eponymous question, or both. Now that we’re creeping into the thick medium of a certain terrible reality, I also read Inside this Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons, and was thunder-struck by it, page by page and cumulatively. I went from there to Loic Wacquant’sPunishing the Poor and Prisons of Poverty. And then to Saint Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre’s beautiful “biography” of Genet (more biographies should be poetic-philosophical treatises that foreclose morality in favor of essence). Around that same time I “read at” Victor Hugo’s autobiographical/diaristic Things Seen, in which Hugo gives us his own lived encounters with History and World-Historical Individuals, as Hegel would call them, in moments like this one: “They executed the king with their hats on, and it was without taking his hat off that Sanson, seizing by the hair the executed head of Louis XVI, showed it to the people, and for a few moments let the blood from it stream onto the scaffold.”
Moving on from that encounter with the “real,” I was eager for the long-awaited October release of Frederic Jameson’sAntinomies of Realism. In fact I remember even kind of revving up for it by producing my own semiotic square for Michel Houllebecq’sThe Map and the Territory, as I read that novel in late summer (the four sides being Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, The House of Prostitution, the House of Euthanasia). Anyhow, Jameson’s new work was foreshadowed by Perry Anderson’s article in the LRB in 2011, interrogating the “postmodern revival” of the historical novel. Lukács, who perhaps invented this literary category, pointed toward realism as the only legitimate novelistic mode into which to summon “History.” In that, all novels become historical novels when and if the present can be sufficiently apprehended as history by their authors. Jameson’s book, dense and meandering as it is, seems to offer multiple crucial antinomies. His conclusions are too complicated to get into here, but Cloud Atlas figures prominently among them, a book that greatly interests Jameson for its formal inventiveness, its pastiche of periods and styles, and for the fact that when all is said and done, despite its relativizing panache, it seems to transform history and ideas into meaning, and in particular, to have something to say about enslavement and emancipation. Thusly, the joyousness of art and the slaughterhouse of humankind both shine through. And Jameson seems to have enjoyed the movie version, too.
(Which I myself have not yet seen, but . . . there is always next year.)
More from A Year in Reading 2013Don't miss:A Year in Reading 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005The good stuff:The Millions' Notable articlesThe motherlode:The Millions' Books and ReviewsLike what you see?Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.

This is the year in which I read too little of contemporary books, even if I bought some 30 or so books, mostly published this year! But in between heavy travels, and a new job that demands my attention like a thrift collector, I found a few. The travel itself brought me in contact with Simon Sylvester’sThe Visitors. It is a wonderful book that tells the story of a strange, quiet town in Scotland being transformed by the incursion of “strangers.” It is rare that a novel mines this level of landscape awareness, or that a novel push you to feel the air of an unknown land blowing at you from reading about it on paper. I visited Scotland for the first time this year, but this book imprinted more than my eyes saw of that wonderful nation during my trip there. The Visitors appears in America next year, and I can’t wait to begin crowing more about it.
I read through The Jewish War by the early-century historian, Flavius Josephus. It is a remarkable attempt to portray Jewish history through a secular lens much different than from that contained in the Torah and the Bible.
The howling masterpiece of 2015 must surely be Eka Kurniawan’sBeauty Is a Wound. It is -- I mean it -- a howl, an outrage, and a sheer burst of particular talent. It is the kind of thing you want fiction to do, and the kind of thing you want to imagine it is doing. It tells the story of a woman who returns from the dead after having birthed a “shirt-like” human being who is uber-ironically named “Beauty.” Kuniarwan sharpens the story of Indonesia with an energy that is rare. An earth-shattering review in Publishers Weekly in June first brought it to my attention, then in October, my agent signed him, and in November I met him in Indonesia.
Just last week, I read Make Your Home Among Strangers by my friend Jennine Capó Crucet, and it struck a chord with me. As a friend, I went into the book with a thicker skin, but it is a genuine, heartfelt portrait of a young woman striving to plant her feet firmly in the soil of an adopted country. It is believable, intriguing, and bright.
More from A Year in Reading 2015Don't miss:A Year in Reading 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005The good stuff:The Millions' Notable articlesThe motherlode:The Millions' Books and ReviewsLike what you see?Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.